


Superman's pal

by IronAndRags



Category: Superman (Comics), Superman - All Media Types
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-11
Updated: 2019-05-18
Packaged: 2020-03-01 02:41:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18791335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IronAndRags/pseuds/IronAndRags
Summary: New York, 2013. Superman's new at this. So is Jimmy Olsen.





	1. Chapter 1

A five-hundred-ton steel girder rocketing towards your skull has a way of focusing your senses. It still worked a little on Clark, even though he knew he could survive it. Just a little bit of the Kansas farmboy left in his brain, from before he knew he couldn't die. Clark sometimes fretted, in contemplative moments, about what would happen when those last traces of fearful instinct washed out of his brain, diluted by too many experiences of solid steel splintering around his body. Every time he did this, he became less human.

The steel girder collided with his skull and broke. The calamity of noise and heat was perfectly familiar. There was another sound, too: _Snap. Snap. Snap._ Somebody was taking pictures.

Unperturbed, Superman glided up to the spandex-clad guy at the controls of the stolen construction crane. The guy looked a lot paler and more freaked out than he had a few seconds earlier.

"You know that I'm not Batman, right?"

The thief nodded dumbly. Geez, did he look scared.

"Okay. I figured you probably watch the news, but some people live under a rock, right? Because if it was 2009 and I was Batman, this would make a lot more sense. With the-" Clark sighed internally before continuing that sentence. "-the giraffe outfit, and the crane, and everything. It was nice of you to take this away from the street, but you caused a lot of property damage and you are definitely going to jail. You understand that, right?"

It looked like the number of giraffe spots on this guy's spandex suit was increasing by one. Superman tactfully refrained from investigating.

 _Snap._ Another photo. It was some kid on the opposite side of the street, holding an expensive camera with an elongated lens. Hmm. Something tickled the back of Superman's brain. Was there something familiar about the kid with the camera?

"You're going to be on Instagram, by the way," Superman said, to the terrified thief. "I know this isn't your finest moment. I'm sorry about that."

The kid snapping the pictures looked to be about eighteen or nineteen, freckly with tousled orange hair and an impish grin. Superman made note of the kid's identity, reading his campus ID card through pocket and wallet. James Olsen, NYU student; and his ID photo checked out, minus the adorable grin. "If someone might be keeping an eye on you, keep an eye on them too." - that was what Lois always said. And she was smart about this public-figure stuff.

Sighing internally as he returned to the issue at hand, Superman hoisted the giraffe guy by the collar and dragged him to the closest police station without much resistance. Leaving a costumed guy tied up for a couple hours until the cops came by was asking for trouble - it would work fine for muggers, but a lot of these spandex villains were the types to sit around playing with locks and doing magic tricks all day. That was a useful bit of advice that Batman had given him.

("Bruce", he reminded himself. We know each other. Calling your actual friend by his superhero name internally is just stupid. Do you want him to think of you as "Superman"? Come on.)

The cops were happy to receive giraffe guy. What a ridiculous waste of time.

Later that night, Clark tried to focus on boiling spaghetti successfully without taking his ear off the police scanner, or his eye off of his twitter feed. A man needs to relax sometimes, right? Having muted everyone who worked for or quote-tweeted Gawker, twitter even sometimes managed not to elevate his superhuman blood pressure.

Lois banged on the door and, just for kicks, he zoomed over to unlock and open it, and back again, before his phone hit the floor. Sure, he could have set it down, but this was practice or something. Definitely something virtuous and not a silly show-off thing. She looked exasperated as she walked in and saw him in the kitchenette.

"You know it makes me nauseous when you do that, right?"

"What, the spaghetti? You don't have to take any," he said, with a dumb smile. He didn't like irritating Lois, but then she set him up for great lines like that.

"I would like some spaghetti, actually. And you should be thanking me right now, because I just figured out another anti-Superman blog is getting LexCorp grants. They're trying to make Superman look bad, digging up old newspapers and stuff. They might really figure something out! Like, your- something personal about you."

"Look, I really appreciate it, but you don't have to do this stuff. You know that, right? Lots of people like me on the internet and, you know, at actual newspapers and stuff. They're not going to take me out or figure out my human name or anything. I know Lex Luthor doesn't like me, but I think LexCorp has bigger priorities," he said.

"Clark, you're the biggest thing in the world right now - maybe even the biggest thing in New York. People are after you. We have to be careful."

He started draining the pasta, trying to be normal-person careful just in case.

"You said you wanted spaghetti, right? You can fill me in on your internet escapades, and I can tell you all about-" he hesitated for a second. There was no reason to bother Lois about the photographer, right? The kid was probably just a birdwatcher who got especially lucky about what construction site to snap goldfinches at. Or whatever. It's easy to fool yourself into thinking you recognize someone.

"-I can tell you all about this giraffe guy. It was the most ridiculous shit ever, he legitimately had a theme, like those guys Batman used to fuck up."

Lois smiled. There. They could have a regular, friendly conversation, as two old friends. There was no reason to let anything to get in the way of that.


	2. Chapter 2

So, LexCorp's media relations people were giving grants for "innovative journalism", for some reason, even though LexCorp wasn't really a media company. This was super shady and _Democracy Now!_ did a great documentary about something something Noam Chomsky something something Palestine in relation to the whole project. Clark nodded along and agreed that he would definitely check that out some time. And now, in Lois's opinion, a suspiciously high number of those grants were going to bloggers and stuff who weren't fans of Superman, who were trying to expose him as a CIA plant or a Chinese psyop or something.

In fact, the CIA had reached out to him, but they hadn't given him any comprehensible instructions so he had sort of assumed that they thought that whatever he was already doing was fine. He'd also definitely gotten some emails in Chinese on the official Superman email that Lois had set up, but the emails hadn't made any sense run through Google translate, and the two of them hadn't been able to think of anyone who spoke Chinese who they were ready to trust. So... hopefully that also worked out okay.

This stuff was kind of stressful. Kind of very stressful.

As he picked up the plates and dunked them in the tiny shitty sink, Clark felt a surge of affection for his friend Lois Lane.

"I really really appreciate you doing this stuff for me. You know that, right?" he said.

Lois laughed. "Didn't you say it was a stupid waste of time?"

"It's not a stupid waste of time. I didn't say that. I- sometimes I get stressed out about this stuff and I try not to think about it very much. But it _is_ important, and I don't know where I'd be without you helping me out on all this stuff. Probably- probably dead in a LexCorp lab somewhere, or something." He hadn't expected to stutter emotionally over those words, and now he felt a little embarrassed.

"I don't think they have scalpels that could vivisect you. But, uh, thanks, Clark. That's really sweet. I think we're all going to be okay, at least in the short term. But staying on top of this stuff is definitely important. In my opinion. I don't know, you know what I mean."

"I do," he said, and then he walked toward her at normal speed (which he felt was important to actually not being a jerk, in situations like this) and gave her a hug. She reciprocated, maybe actually a little more intensely than he'd been anticipating.

"Well, it was really nice seeing you," he said, when she finally let go.

"We should definitely do this again, soon," he added, after a pause.

She nodded. "Oh, absolutely. It was great talking to you, Clark. And- you take care of yourself, okay?" She gave him a funny kind of smile.

He grinned back. "Definitely."

She walked out into the night. He closed the apartment door, and then sat heavily on the old ratty armchair that he kept by the entrance. Maybe it really would be a good idea to look into that kid, with the camera, and the smile. Just in case.

~~

Jimmy Olsen, on the other hand, was having a great night. He had managed _another_ photo of Superman, from a _very_ flattering angle. Up on that crane? Holding that giraffe guy by the collar - oh oh man. Wowzers.

He felt around the narrow bones of his own neck. For no particular reason. There were no particular steel-like hands that he had any reason to be picturing gripped around his throat, and there was no reason in particular why he was twitching, almost writhing against his pillow-

"Jimmy, if you are jacking off when I walk into this room I'm going to punt your head through the ceiling, got it?!" boomed a voice outside the dorm room door.

That was Ralph. His roommate. Jimmy blushed a deep red and straightened his pajama pants. He was _not_ jacking off, but he didn't want there to be even a shadow of a doubt. "I got it, Ralph!" He sat up resolutely on his bed, trying to control himself. He was careful now. He hated thinking about the incident that his roommate was referring to, but Ralph seemed determined to bring it up at every possible opportunity. What an asshole.

As Ralph walked through the door, Jimmy had a thought and suddenly closed his laptop, too. That probably looked pretty suspicious, but he just didn't want Ralph of all people finding out about his blog and giving him even more reasons to be embarrassed. The "Super Scoops" blog was a personal thing. A personal thing between him and ten thousand other people with a totally platonic, scientific interest in a certain city-saving vigilante's very clingy uniform.

Ralph, who was somehow always chewing a piece of gum, gave him a searching look. "Are you going to the party at Dave's tonight? I can get you in, you know."

Jimmy shook his head. "Who's Dave?"

Ralph shrugged. Well, there you go. "I'm not interested," Jimmy repeated.

"Your loss," said Ralph.

Jimmy had other plans tonight. And not just refreshing the view count analytics on his blog over and over again. Which was fun, but kind of a waste of time. There was something about his last run-in with Superman, when he'd been snapping photos of that big construction site, that was kind of stuck in his craw. It had seemed for a second like- oh, something. Who the heck could guess.

But he kind of wanted to go back to that construction site. Take a look around, remind himself how far apart everything was. How little you could see from way up in the air. Maybe then he wouldn't feel so weird about it.

It's not like he was gonna do much else besides sleep and, you know, actually jack off, while Ralph was at that party. But he wanted to get his head out of this particular rut.

He made up his mind. He was going to get dressed, again, and head back to the construction site tonight.

~~

Clark corkscrewed up from the top of the Daily Planet building, spinning lazily in the air. A good way to get seasick, but it was a breathtaking effect, and sometimes he just couldn't help himself. Yup, now he wanted to barf. He righted himself and sat on the golden rim of the globe that was perched on the building's peak. He didn't rest his whole weight, of course. You had to be so careful up in the air; nobody expects a really-excessively-strong person to be interacting with the ornaments on top of skyscrapers.

He kicked his feet and tried to think. No reporters up here, thankfully. He wished his super-sight and super-hearing were as powerful as some newspapers seemed to think they were. Then he could just scan the whole city for any crime going on, any person he was trying to look for. There would be a lot less to worry about if he could do that.

As it was, he resolved to just sort of float around downtown until he thought of a better way to start looking for that kid.

"I really should've just told Lois about this. She's a lot better at the cloak-and-dagger stuff," he said, out loud. Which, case in point.

He glided down to street level, just above a lamppost, and let himself relax a little. Just a little scavenger hunt. As he searched the block, somewhat aimlessly, he crossed his arms and thought, hard, about all of these things - about Lois, and Lex Luthor, and handsome college kids who might be working for LexCorp, or something, and whatever the Chinese government may or may not be trying to ask him for. As he did, he drifted lazily from street to street, slowly approaching that construction site - the place where all this anxiety had started really boiling inside him. Really, he thought, what he needed right now was to just clear his head. To try to focus, and get a certain smiling face out of it. There were so many things he _actually_ had to worry about.


	3. Chapter 3

From two blocks away and change, a shadowy, slender figure at the edge of the construction site came into focus. Superman's heart skipped a beat. Since there was no reason at all to be nervous about a teenager with a Panasonic, whether he worked for LexCorp or not, he tried to calm down his titanium heart, and slow the gasps of air passing through his indestructible alien windpipe. This is more Kansas farmboy instincts, he told himself.

But why would the Kansas farmboy in his brain be worried about a cute red-haired reporter?

He lifted himself higher into the air, trying to stay out of the kid's line of sight. He hadn't really prepared himself to actually accomplish something on this scavenger hunt. It had been more of a "now I can tell Lois that I definitely spent some time looking into it" thing. Or a "now I can tell _myself_ that I spent some time looking into it thing" thing, since in fact Lois didn't know about this particular thread of paranoia. But the little Lois in his head who liked to give him advice when the real Lois wasn't around had a _lot_ of opinions on this one. She was pleased that something was actually coming of his boneheaded "investigation".

The rest of him felt like a bunch of kryptonite weights had settled into his soles. He glided, slowly, behind the half-built apartment complex, where he'd be shielded from an ordinary person's line of sight. He ducked around the hole giraffe guy had left in the edifice and settled with his back against a concrete wall, a couple hundred feet in the air.

Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.

~~

Jimmy Olsen walked quietly to the place where he'd been taking pictures earlier that day. He bounced with energy as he walked. There was something exciting about the whole thing. But also kind of scary. He wasn't sure exactly what he was looking for, but this was a first step in putting his mind at ease. He wriggled with excitement as he turned and stood right where he had that morning, and the half-finished building loomed in front of him.

Wooo, spooky.

Then he caught an unmistakable flash of color. Yup, it was obvious. A red cape, fluttering past the newly-formed hole in the concrete structure. 

His heart raced. Superman was here.

He paused for a moment and considered what to do. Here he was, mod J.O., administrator of the "Super Scoops" blog and arch-horny-for-Superman-guy of the entire internet. But that was, you know, a hobby. It was a thing that he did. And the whole idea of the actual Superman, with his actual hands which could actually break an iron bar in two, spotting him, recognizing him- no, it was way too ridiculous.

He turned toward the half-finished building and shouted "I'm Jimmy Olsen! I run a blog about you, I take photos sometimes! That's all! I don't need to meet you, I don't mean you any harm! I was just taking a photo!" Then he turned and ran.

He was kind of panicking. He just wanted this whole thing to be over.

As he sprinted back towards his dorm he suddenly ran into a wall of person, smelly and hard. He stumbled back. A guy in a gray hoodie was staring him in the eye and pointing a gun at his chest.

"Wallet and keys, kid," the mugger rumbled. Jimmy scrambled for his wallet, unthinkingly. As he was handing it over, he remembered with a combination of relief and... something else... that he had only been running for about a block and a half.

The mugger had a second to be surprised, which was a pretty unforgettable look, and then he was on the ground, in a flash of red and blue. Standing in his place was Superman, all six and a half feet of him, his blue spandex tight against his bulging chest. His cobalt eyes looked into Jimmy's with an indecipherable expression. Oh, man.

"I know you said you didn't want to meet me, sorry," Superman said, half-smiling. His voice was higher and thinner than Jimmy remembered from seeing him on TV. Maybe that was one of those things about how TV works.

Superman handed him his wallet, and when Jimmy reached out to take it there was an awkward pause. Their fingers had met, and it would have only been an instant, but Superman - wasn't holding on with all his strength, surely, but he wasn't letting go, either.

"You know, I've heard of the 'Super Scoops' blog," Superman said, his overly-loud voice still wobbly. Jimmy was now definitely blushing. He tried to nod, as if that would end this excruciating moment.

His heart was beating faster than it ever had before. He felt strangely excited, but also absolutely terrified. Only his wildest imagination could cover where this thing might go. This was unexplored territory.

Superman's fingers twitched, still touching him, and holding onto the wallet with that strangely ordinary firmness. Okay, Jimmy decided. I need to figure out how I feel about this _right now_ , before anything happens. Superman isn't a bad guy. I have a decision to make.

How did he feel about this? Well, the situation could become complicated fast. It should be a really hard decision, requiring careful consideration. It should be something that he very carefully pondered and it definitely shouldn't be something he assented to just because the overwhelming thought in his head right now was that he wanted to continue to be touched by Superman, or anything like that.

But, well, it was a little hard to think at the moment. He kept his fingers on Superman's, loosely gripping the leather wallet. He looked up expectantly into the alien's cobalt eyes. Oh, boy.

Oh, man. Oh man.


	4. Chapter 4

Superman was in a difficult position himself. Here was James "Jimmy" Bartholomew Olsen, a human man, standing in front of him. They both knew what kind of thing was going on here. But the fact was, also, that Superman could, if he wanted to, rip Jimmy Olsen's head from his shoulders, pulverize Jimmy Olsen's fingers to dust with his bare hands, and so on. There was something that felt untoward about it. Not just that, there was something deeply wrong. A memory niggled at the corner of his mind.

He remembered what Bruce had said about Robins.

"I couldn't have a female Robin," Batman had said, when Clark had broached the subject with him.

"Why not?" he had asked.

"Well, it would create a weird situation. You can see that, right, Clark? Having a sidekick like that is a really emotionally and physically intense thing, and it would just be incredibly inappropriate, or it would create the _appearance_ of inappropriateness, if Robin was a girl."

Clark had looked at him, apparently a little quizzically. Bruce had sighed.

"People are scared of me, Clark. I'm a big, scary guy who dresses all in black and clobbers the hell out of hardened criminals. If I was toting around an eighteen year old girl in yellow tights, who lived with me in the Batcave and- look, it would freak people out. People would be scared, disgusted, titillated, whatever. There would be no way around the issue, because the public would inevitably assume there was an inappropriate relationship."

"So you and Tim-"

"Clark, no. No! Jesus Christ. That's fucking disgusting."

Right. That had been that conversation.

Bruce was an older guy, relatively speaking. In well-deserved retirement. He'd done the world a lot of good, and Clark didn't begrudge him his prejudices. But just as obviously, what Bruce thought about what was appropriate and what wasn't couldn't be the end of the conversation.

Besides, Bruce didn't have superpowers. Bruce had been born on Earth. He had girlfriends and business partners and golf buddies. He wasn't an alien in someone else's world. He wasn't this... lonely.

Or maybe he was. Who could really tell? Orphaned as a kid, raised by a butler. Maybe he felt it too, and he just knew how to control it.

That aching, empty hole in your stomach. Where Ma and Pa Kent should have been, and the Kansas farm where he'd carved burning ruts into the cornfields that never grew back. Where he'd broken Pa's tractor by lying down in the tall grass. Where you always had to stand outside, under the glare of that feeble yellow sun.

It was night now. There was no moon. Jimmy Olsen was in front of him, smiling and trembling. Pale in the cold night. His freckles twinkled like the stars.

Superman leaned in and kissed him.

He was very careful, all too aware of how fragile human jawbones were, how easily their lips could tear. But he kissed him. And Jimmy Olsen didn't pull away.

~~

Holy fuck, Jimmy thought to himself, incredibly calmly, as he got a very up-close and personal look at Superman's chiseled face. I'm fucking kissing Superman!

The kiss lasted for maybe seven seconds, but that was the primary thought in his head for about the next twenty-four hours. It raced through his head while they chatted, Superman looking him in the eye, laughing at his jokes. There was something profoundly unreal about it. "I kissed Superman!" he whispered to himself, out loud, as he was walking home, practically floating on air. He had kissed a guy who could actually float on the literal air. He had laughed flirtatiously with a guy who could bend an iron bar with one pinky. He had a phone number in his pocket, which he had sworn to keep under the utmost secrecy and which would connect him, personally, with the man of steel, a man who could literally fly into outer space without needing to breathe or anything according to a Popular Science article he had read once.

And that. Was the guy he had kissed!

Ralph you fucking idiot, he thought to himself. You went to that party and you think you're so much better than me but I just kissed! The actual Superman! That is definitely more fun than whatever the heck goes on at those parties! And it happened because I am a blogger which means that I am definitively not a loser, by any remotely reasonable person's judgement, he told himself. I am an extremely cool guy, who was just kissed by the actual Superman.

The subject of how to manage the blog going forward was one that he briefly considered, but decided to put off until later. First he had to decide when he was going to... call Superman... and what exactly he was going to say. His whole life, it occurred to him, might be about to go in a pretty strange direction.

~~

Superman had his own problems.

"That would be a bad idea," he had wisely thought, as he was preparing to kiss Jimmy Olsen.

"This is a bad idea," he had thought, in his infinite sagacity, while he was in the process of kissing Jimmy Olsen.

"This is an extremely terrible idea, you are causing a lot of problems for yourself and you are going to deeply regret this," he had thought, with the calm and firmness of the most penetrating Buddhist master, as he was giving Jimmy Olsen his number in a flirtatious way and awkwardly clarifying that this wasn't like, a groupie thing, he was genuinely a like lonely person, and probably saying a bunch of other egregiously embarrassing things which he was choosing now to gloss over in his mind.

Lois wouldn't be happy about this, he realized, as he was floating away, his adamantine stomach doing some kind of peculiar acrobatics. That was a thought that was going to be hard to avoid.

Not just because going down this road with Jimmy Olsen was obviously, obviously a security risk. The Lois in his head was already berating him for that and he felt appropriately ashamed. But, well, Lois might have other reasons for feeling ambivalent about this development, too. He tried not to think about it, but it was kind of obvious that there was something there. Lois knew he was gay, and presumably she was aware on an intellectual level that he could theoretically start dating someone. But he had always been apart from the world. Maybe Lois was comfortable with that. Maybe it was why she was able to be such a good friend. He really preferred not to think about this whole subject area.

He just really, really didn't want to lose Lois. She was his anchor to the real world. Anything else should really come second to making sure she felt okay going to see him, that nothing came between the two of them and their friendship. He couldn't bear to imagine her shocked, disappointed, jealous, aggrieved- the whole thing was just terrible. He felt terrible for putting himself, and her, in this position.

It was hard to feel bad about kissing Jimmy Olsen, though. Or holding Jimmy Olsen's hand for a second before they parted ways.

He just didn't want to pay for that by having everything else fall apart.

In the event, he had dinner with Lois that night, and he pretty much felt like he had to tell her about the whole thing then.

They had a private room at Mary's, a pretty classy Bistro type place. It was an expensive thing, but they were celebrating one whole year of Superman-ing (Supermanning?), and as Lois had said, if they were going to spend that much money they should spend enough that they could talk to each other without worrying about who was listening. So here they were.

Clark played with his silverware distractedly, wrapping a fork around his finger and then flattening it out again.

"You're going to ruin their nice silverware," Lois said, not entirely unfriendly. He sighed and set it down.

"Is something bothering you, Clark? You seem anxious. I talked to the owners, this room is totally soundproofed. And you know how to look for bugs, so I didn't really bother with that. But nobody's listening, right?" she asked.

"Nobody's listening. Look, Lois, there's something I should probably tell you," he said. Well, better now than never.

Lois looked at him with a sort of worried, pitying expression. He pushed forward.

He glanced repeatedly at the fancy oak door, but they had only just ordered. He closed his eyes for a second, which was only marginally calming since he'd gotten in the terrible habit of looking through his own eyelids with his X-ray vision.

"The other day, when I was making short work of that, you know, the giraffe guy, there was somebody snapping photos who I thought I recognized. This ki- this guy Jimmy Olsen."

Lois lit up. "Oh, he runs that ridiculous 'Super Scoops' blog, right?" she asked.

Clark nodded. "That's the guy I'm talking about. But, uh, I couldn't place where I had seen him before and I didn't want to bother you about it, and also, uh, Jimmy Olsen is a very attractive young man, you know, and anyway so I went looking for him, kind of, although I wasn't really expecting to find him at all-"

Clark tried to rush through the rest of the story as fast as possible. Lois was staring at him, almost in disbelief, although there was the ghost of something else playing around her lips as well.

"So you've spoken to this Jimmy Olsen guy for about thirty seconds, max," she said, breaking the uncomfortable silence.

Clark started separating the tines of his fork. "Well, no, we talked for a while. And I've been reading his old internet posts and stuff which, yeah, you're right, that doesn't count," he said, noticing the look on Lois's face.

She laughed. "Clark, don't be so goddamn shy about it. If you like this guy- well, things will be a little more complicated, but if you're less lonely because this kid is in your life then that's the best news I've heard all year!" Lois was actually smiling at him now. She looked excited.

He looked up at her in surprise, and he couldn't help breaking into a smile himself. That hadn't been quite the reaction he was expecting. She must have noticed the surprise on his face.

"Come on, Clark! Do you think I want to be the only person in the world responsible for keeping the man of steel's head on his shoulders? I know you stay up breaking ropes on your neck, man. If you treat this kid right, and he treats you right, I can only see how that could be a good thing. For you, for me, for the world, et cetera," she said.

"But what if-"

"If it doesn't work out, I say we give him a costume, Batman-style. Then it's just a superhero-to-superhero camaraderie thing, everyone knows each other's identities, and the messy past need not be worried about. That's the plan I thought of when you wouldn't shut up about that actor, what was his name-"

Clark blushed.

"-anyway, sorry. The point is, I wouldn't stress out about that part of it. And you're an easy guy to like, supes," she said. He smiled, easily this time.

Their burgers came. Clark crumpled up his fork and hid it in the napkin.

It was a good night. And not just one bright spot in between days and days of isolation, either; because tomorrow, or the next day, he would talk to Jimmy Olsen again.

For the first time in a long time, it felt good to be Superman.


End file.
